Reviewing the Reviewers

Critically reviewing a review of Firefox.

This
review of Firefox v. Internet Explorer is embarrassing in its inaccuracy.

Example 1:

Also, if you use the keyboard to move through links on a Web
page, Firefox does not remember the last location that you were on if you leave
the page and return via the back button. Internet Explorer does.

I'm not going to defend Firefox as a wonderfully keyboard-friendly
browser. As someone who maintains a healthy distance from the mouse at all
times, I've noticed a lot of shortcomings in Firefox's keyboard support. But
this isn't one of them. This guy obviously tested this on some goofy web site
with code that borked his back button. Or, maybe he opened the link in a new
tab and couldn't figure out that the browsing history from one tab does not
transfer to another tab. Either way, he should have been more thorough, unless
the point of this review was to illustrate what you can get from Firefox in a
brief encounter.

Example 2:

Don't expect everything to be rosy with Firefox, however. This
is still new software, not as mature as Internet Explorer, and you're bound to
find behaviours that you did not expect.

"mature" is Microsoftese for "fucking ancient." Irresponsible to say this
in a review without any supporting details.

And finally,

Firefox renders graphics differently on some sites, for
instance. While Internet Explorer rarely stumbles over formatting, Firefox
apparently still has some issues to work out occasionally when formatting
graphics-laden locations on the internet.

"rarely stumbles over formatting"?! Assuming that proper formatting has
something to do with web standards, this is very misleading. It only takes
about 5 minutes of research to discover that Firefox is far ahead of IE in
terms of being standards-compliant. And I don't know what type of graphics
these were, but they obviously weren't PNGs with transparency, which IE does
not support.

The review does say some positive things about Firefox, but these little
gems caught my eye. It didn't help that they are from the concluding
paragraphs.